SOURCE: “Proletarian Tragedy: Wyndham Lewis' Revenge for Love,” in Modern Age, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter, 1983, pp. 61-6.

In the following essay, Russell examines elements of tragedy in Lewis's novel, Revenge for Love.

One of the easiest things to forget about the two heroes and the heroine of Wyndham Lewis' The Revenge for Love—English characters whose lives come to ruin as they attempt to aid the Spanish communists—is that they are all three proletarians, and in fact the only proletarians shown to us in this 1937 novel (available nowadays from Regnery Gateway). Opening and closing in Spain, on scenes of imprisonment and death, the book is not really about the civil war but about communistic habits of mind and the fact that decency is a quality that makes men entrappable. Such a sense of conflict—between an ideology based on betrayal and its unwitting operatives, the ones “used up...